3- And, best of all: absolutely nothing seems to be able to diminish the confidence that experts feel. The last one is truly remarkable: even if experts try to honestly face evidence of their own past failures, even if they deeply understand this flaw in human cognition they will still feel a deep sense of confidence in the accuracy of their predictions.
A better way to put this is people who do not feel such overconfidence will not be recognized as "experts" by anyone. This is a social problem, not a personal one. Human beings more readily believe confidence than veracity. This why there are so many confident idiots around.
This should be obvious to anyone who has dealt substantially with other people at any time in his or her life. Confidence makes one an expert -- more than documents or proof or the ability to obtain, compile, and present convincing evidence.
It seems to me that this is the same sort of "justice" the Department of Injustice was meting out. It seems as if the old proverb "what goes around comes around" is particularly applicable in this case. What is unjust about the abusers being abused?
All the personnel at JSTOR deserve to lose their jobs. They are the real pirates: They take a public resource, steal it from the public, and sell it back to the public. This is like someone stealing your car and charging to give it back to you. Or better yet, your neighbor charging you to walk the sidewalk in front of his and your house.
You would not tolerate this behavior from your neighbor. Why do you tolerate it from a website?
Should the employees and investors of JSTOR continue to get paid for theft?
The reason the prosecution has been called "overzealous" is because when the DOJ found they had no evidence of criminal behavior, the rolled out the overly broad CFAA, under which most people's Google searches might be able to be prosecuted, to get him. It is a classic case of the "everyone is guilty" attitude of the police in the English cultural sphere. "If I can't prosecute you for this crime, I will use some other irrelevant thing to make sure you pay." We might as well have cops go gun him down like they do in the movies if we allow this.
This is just more evidence that the US is continuously returning to its feudal English roots where justice means the royal family is right and everyone else can go to hell.
It is good to keep in mind that:
Aaron was downloading documents that he had legal and authorized access to,
he had a right to be on the MIT campus,
the documents he downloaded were Public Domain documents (which are free of all restrictions for anyone for any purpose -- essentially the property of the public at large),
JSTOR is arguably committing a crime by artificially restricting a public resource.
That is the lie JSTOR wants everyone to believe. While they claimed to be dropping the case, they were pushing MIT to prosecute -- repeatedly. They must have learned from Adobe's treatment of Sklyarov. Like all corporations, they want to keep their reprehensible activities out of the spotlight. This is why they are pushing for anonymity. They can hide and claim it really was not their fault. In fact, they are the principal puppet master for this whole show. And in the end, they will be seen as having no guilt. This is both the worst possible and most probable outcome.
Even if he had disseminated the documents, it still would not have been wrong. Disseminating Public Domain documents is everyone's right no matter how they were obtained.
You have made some interesting arguments, but they are mostly wrong. Let's take them one by one...
In any case, it doesn't help anything when Anonymous and Lulzsec make threats.
Yes, it does. This response and the principal actors wanting to keep their identities secret is a testament to how much influence these threats have. These criminals with badges are scared. I am glad that there is at least fear to keep their abuse of power in check.
Personally I liked the Guy Fawkes image that V put out, but Anonymous doesn't fit it at all, in fact they ruin it if anything.
On the contrary, they are improving it. Guy Fawkes was nothing but a Catholic and a failure. He was caught in the attempt and hanged as a criminal. In addition, he had a cause that few today would identify as a righteous one. Anonymous, by contrast, has fought against government corruption, the Zetas, and even rapists. They are much more upstanding than Guy Fawkes ever imagined being.
Would V espouse silencing his opposition? That's what anonymous does when they DDoS.
IIRC, V was entirely intent upon revenge: "V for Vendetta". He silenced everybody that had any possibility of opposing his plan, but not with a DDoS. His opponents' silence was a bit more permanent.
It seemed to me that V wanted to bring justice and empower the oppressed, if not he would have killed or at least silenced those detectives who were actively working against him, yet he didn't do either.
The detectives were a tool he used. Viewing himself as evil, he wanted to remove himself from the new world he had created, so he used the detective as a tool to kill himself. The detective was no more in control of himself than Brad Pitt's character was in Seven. While V's revenge had the element of justice, it really was an act of revenge concocted by a brilliant, semi-sane, suicidal freak. Anonymous, on the other hand, has mostly been motivated by injustice or entertainment. Either one is less damnable than revenge or suicidal insanity.
Therefore, I must reject your arguments until you base them upon a more solid foundation.
An article I read said that MIT reacted to JSTOR complaints. It seems from what I have read that JSTOR wanted MIT to be the bad cop while they repeatedly made public statements about how they were willing to let him off. It appears that their PR people may have learned from the Adobe - Sklyarov incident.
In that case, Adobe initiated the case and actively pushed it until the public outcry hit. Then they quickly backed off and claimed they asked for his release. It is impossible to say what really goes on behind closed doors, but the fact that the DOJ refused to drop the case is telling. I have always believed that they backpedaled publicly but kept pushing for prosecution behind closed doors. That way, everything would be perfect: They would get to punish Sklyarov and also hoodwink the public into thinking they were good or at least not so bad.
JSTOR was probably afraid of weathering the ire of the internet but still wanted him punished as an example. Pushing MIT to be the bad cop would accomplish this goal perfectly. MIT could take the heat, and JSTOR would get its crucifiction. Perfect.
Why does the discussion always center around suicide and Aaron's courage or lack of it? It is now obvious that the Department of Injustice was actually out to get him. It is also now clear that they targeted him for his views and not his actions. Given these facts, how can we -- netizens, citizens of the USA, citizens of the world, humans... take your pick -- allow entities like JSTOR and PACER to continue to exist? And why are we not looking for the people who orchestrated this fiasco (as opposed to the lowly public servants who coldly executed their wishes in obvious contravention of their oaths of office and their duties to the Constitution and people of the US and the world)?
Where are the executives of JSTOR who clandestinely pulled strings to bring on this relentless and unmerited legal assault? Why was the mysterious JSTOR "contact" who complained repeatedly to MIT officials and asked them to take action not identified? Directly or indirectly, JSTOR is responsible for this tragic death. When are they going to apologize or try to make things right? When is the information Aaron sought going to be available to us all? When are we going to ban JSTOR and PACER's theft from the public? When are JSTOR and PACER going to return their ill gotten gains to the people whose documents they stole?
For those who will make the argument: Copying is not theft. Keeping people from accessing things they rightfully own or should have access to is. A car is stolen when the owner cannot use it anymore, not when the same model is produced again by the factory. The owners of these documents are all the members of the public. Denying access to anyone for any reason is theft.
From when I first heard this news, I could not help thinking of the Dmitry Sklyarov case. In both cases, a corporation complained: Adobe and JSTOR. In both cases, when the the corporation found this action was not popular, they "officially" backed off: Adobe dropped the charges due to an internet outcry. JSTOR was "unwilling" to press charges. Finally, in both cases, the prosecutor was adamant that the trial continue.
I think the puppet show should be fairly obvious to anyone looking at the facts. JSTOR was obviously complaining a lot to MIT and pushing MIT to prosecute. JSTOR just did not want anyone to know publicly that they were doing that. Will MIT publish all of its communications with JSTOR related to this incident? While TFA names the individual at MIT that was receiving the complaints, it does not mention who at JSTOR was complaining. I find the secrecy around this a little telling.
In an assassination, who is the real murderer: the person who orders the assassination or the person who pulls the trigger? In my opinion, they are all guilty. JSTOR is playing innocent, and they should not be allowed to do so. Further, Aaron had a point, JSTOR's existence is an assault on the First Amendment and the very concepts of democracy and science.
I think that JSTOR should be dissolved as a result of this incident, and all documents under its control should lose their copyrights; publishers be damned.
eldavojohn's comment contained an attack that I have often heard, but that I think is never answered in the proper way. This question forces RMS to answer to a perceived inconsistency in his world view when, in fact, eldavojohn should be the one re-examining his world view and the assumptions it is based upon.
Growing up in the United States, I have been served the koolaid of Capitalism several times and I have been taught that the inherent competition and struggle for money in all aspects of our lives make us the greatest country ever. I've read a lot of your comments on intellectual property reform and I can't help but feel that it just isn't compatible with capitalism. Have you ever had problems rectifying your stance on intellectual property with capitalism?
I always find it very interesting every time I see this argument. What is it about the US education system that gives the impression that monopolies such as copyright and patent are inherent and necessary elements of "capitalism"? Is it just a "This is our system now, and our system now is capitalism" kind of thing?
Monopolies are the opposite of Laissez-faire capitalism or free trade. They restrict who can participate in money making enterprises. They are inherently prejudicial and usually prejudicial to wealthy parties. Further, government backed monopolies, as opposed to spontaneous wealth based monopolies, are an unfair abuse of government power to restrict the free market. Monopolies have a long history in Europe's feudal period, and copyright itself was born out of a long tradition of monarchical censorship in England in which the publishers were charged with monopolizing information to control the public.
The term "intellectual property" leads to even scarier territory. The term itself smacks of 1984's Thought Police. I am certain that is not your picture of "capitalism". The very concept that ideas can be "property" is offensive. While you are at it, why not package all the air in the world and charge people to breathe?
As such, whose view of capitalism is really flawed and in need of rectification: yours? or Mr. Stallman's? The way I see it, the onus is on you, eldavojohn, to justify your incorrect view of what capitalism is, your support of feudalism, and your support of censorship. Do you believe in capitalism, the free market, and liberal democracy? Or do you believe in communism, restricted trade, and monarchies?
Imagine going to 10 or 20 years with no babies. This would be the best thing that could ever happen to the world, and it would delay the inevitable resource failure that always occurs with massive population growth. There will soon be 7 Billion people on the planet (yes, that is with a BIG B). A generation without babies would relieve economic and resource pressure greatly without the intervention of disease or starvation or war. We can only hope that this author is right -- even though biology and nature observably prove him wrong.
The Slashdot crowd is a good audience for the math of this whole thing. Fact: A single bacterium with unlimited space to grow and an unlimited food supply can reproduce enough to equal the weight of the Earth in just 72 hours (cell division every 30 seconds). Try it yourself. Post the code in this thread. I will if I get time this afternoon.
Anyone who has done big "O" notation knows that exponential growth is second only to factorial growth and that the rate quickly exceeds whatever resources are allocated. However, no one applies these numbers to the world we live in. Sooner or later, the resources must be exhausted. So, a generation that does not have kids would be a welcome break from our bounding dash for the abyss.
Someone will inevitably argue about the problems this could cause. Yeah, old people might have to work, but the real effect will be that employers will have to hire experienced people instead of ignorant college kids. Employers and teachers have the most to lose. Employers because they exploit young people for cheap labor, and teachers because their jobs depend on children. But all of these considerations are miniscule when compared to global starvation or war or both.
It gets even more absurd when you consider that this whole discussion really is not about "lending e-books" but rather lending e-book readers. These publishers are placing these limits even though the libraries have a limited number of devices they are handing out (far fewer than the books they carry).
From what I read, none of the articles mentioned just having the library load the file onto your preferred device. So, obviously, they are speaking in general terms to confound the issue again.
There is friction: Libraries can only afford to have so many e-book readers on loan at any given time. In addition to that, they have to pay for all the books they loan on those few devices -- no matter how many times they lend them. Plus, for the publishers, they have to purchase books at least twice (one physical and one electronic). So, libraries are spending more, and the publishers are using this to once again bamboozle the public into seeing them as the victim.
Good point. I think RMS' concept is not out of touch with the times so much as out of touch with convenience. He has shown time and time again that he is willing to sacrifice convenience for freedom. In my opinion, the world needs more such people.
After all, Stalin really didn't institute any effective data system that kept track of the minute details of his citizens' lives. This was mostly because he didn't have the technology, but that's just a detail. His major Evil Achievement was arranging to slaughter tens of millions of his own citizens, mostly people who weren't even his political enemies. This didn't require massive monitoring or huge databases; it merely required sending out the troops.
From what a friend claimed, it did involve massive lists, though. Evidently, Stalin approved the executions of hundreds of people a night by name. I had known that he stayed up all night during his schooling to read numerous books per night, but I had not known that he was such a micro-manager. In any case, mass executions are generally supported by accounting systems: the better the accounting system, the more victims. Stalin was hardly the only one to use an efficient accounting system to kill millions in the last century. The existence of this information is threatening because we cannot know what will be in the imaginations of the Stalins of the future.
The point is that this is a new phenomenon, with implications most people haven't considered.
As I imagine that is the purpose of Slashdot and as I started reading this discussion with that in mind, what would be a good solution to this problem?
Does everyone have to become a phreaker to protect their privacy? Would new laws help? How could an individual "stick it to the man" (especially if that "man" were a hundred billion dollar behemoth like AT&T)? Could a social practice, such as hundreds of people buying unlimited plans and swapping phones permanently or frequently, mitigate the effects of this? Or is the human race just doomed?
I have been wondering this since I read RMS does not carry a cellphone. Do we need another creative visionary to come up with a completely unanticipated solution to this problem?
Our Grocery stores track what we purchase, and everyone said "oh well, cheaper prices" (BS But okay).
Our ISPs track our information, even hijack DNS error pages now. Everyone said "Oh well, they are a business"
Now this, and I guarantee it will be "Oh well, they are a business that needs to make money"
I think there is a difference between the tracking the grocery store is doing and the tracking a phone company is doing. At a grocery store, it is completely voluntary. Customers do not have to have tracking numbers (I, for one, have never had one). If they do choose to have their purchases tracked, they are "paid" for it in discounts. And that tracking is limited to what the customers purchased and perhaps the store they purchased it in.
Cellphones, on the other hand, are tracking your physical location at any given time. No announcement is given, and customers get no discounts or other rewards for using cellphones. In fact, cellphone companies, while creating and probably selling this valuable data, are constantly looking for ways to charge their customers more money for service. In addition to all this, in the US, all or nearly all of the major cellphone carriers were complicit in sharing this information with the federal government unlawfully and pushing for unconstitutional laws to back out of it.
Online tracking is often not connected to one's real identity. In fact, this is why so many people are alarmed when they talk about being able to identify people by their habits. It is getting more and more difficult to remain anonymous, and that is obviously a threat to privacy. Cellphones are always tied to identity, even more than Internet access. A cellphone is with you wherever you go and whatever you do. Connections to the Internet can be made and severed, and there is no way to be certain that a given individual is behind a given computer. With cellphones, again, this is not the case. People occasionally loan their cellphones to other people, but not with near the frequency with which people borrow others' computers (Corporations are trying to change this with dumb Internet devices like the Ipad).
So much more private and individually traceable information is available to cellphone carriers that it could almost be separated into its own league of privacy discussions. As more and more people access the Internet through their cellphones, the shift away from privacy will be even more dramatic and frightening than it was over the last decade. If anyone is considering a privacy Bill of Rights, it should start with the cellphone carriers. They are probably the biggest single enemy of privacy the public has ever faced.
How is using software from MS any less risky? It isn't like MS products haven't contained illegally copied code in the past.
Worse yet. They may choose to discontinue the product and all support for it or break it with an update -- as they have done repeatedly in the past. If Google discontinues Android, any or all of the companies currently distributing it can continue as before. Google cannot pull the plug on Android. WinPhone7 can be destroyed whenever MS chooses.
And all that is assuming that it will be usable enough for anyone to care. If older versions of Windows Mobile and WinCE are any indication, no one will.
As for illegally copied software in MS products, who could ever know? As they keep their source code secret, you can never know if they are infringing or not or what it will mean if they get caught. This is why all this anti-FOSS stuff is so absurd. FOSS is clean, and anybody can check. No MS software can make that claim because their source code is not available to public scrutiny. They are the true communists -- people supporting a system of autocratic secretive control supported by barely believable lies.
You know, there are two licensing-related problems Google is facing now with Android: the Oracle lawsuit, and now this. Both seem to have at least partially arisen because Google didn't float stuff past people who have interests in the technologies they chose to use.
This is unfair to Google. I have plenty of gripes with Android, but these two were not Google's fault. First, nobody considered the header files to be copyrightable material. As one poster above pointed out, people in the FOSS community laughed when SCO made such a claim just a few years ago. If it was not an issue then, how can Google be wrong now? They did not exactly strip out the copyright notices in the kernel source and call it the "Android Kernel®", did they?
In the case of the Java problem, Google could not have anticipated that Sun would be bought by a hostile company that would try to rob them using copyrights. Sun, for all its faults, was pretty reasonable about Java. The new owner, on the other hand, is predatory and crooked. They see an opportunity to hit Google up for some cash, and they are taking it. To blame Google for being a victim of lawyers would be like blaming victims of a natural disaster for living in a place where no natural disasters had struck yet.
Is this Privacy Bill going to protect us from DHS border searches? Since this administration has been so pro-ACTA, I think they should certainly review their opinions on privacy.
I have just wasted the last 24 minutes loading all that Scribd garbage on this slow connection only to find that downloading the document requires a Facebook account. Why is this document not on the Open Internet, I ask? If an Open Internet is what is wanted, why use closed and privacy assaulting services like Facebook? What happened to HTML?
Scribd is only giving me the first 3 pages (of eight). I cannot download the page without identifying myself. Scribd is absolutely full of advertising -- probably three quarters of the time I just wasted loading the site. What is Free or Open about that?
I do not know if this was pointed out elsewhere -- I am certainly not going to read all the comments to find out -- but this post contains a rather large error in relation to copyright. The Slashdot post says:
Monica Gaudio, a recipe author who discovered her recipe has been published without her knowledge. [Emphasis mine]
IANAL, but by my understanding of US copyright law according to statements of such people as Jessica Litman, recipes are not subject to copyright as they are merely a set of facts. Copyright does not cover facts. It covers creative works. Cooking may be an art, but the documentation of a set of procedures is not. So, if the "article" is merely a recipe, Cooks Source is completely correct about its own materials -- although they used entirely the wrong language to express this and made incorrect statements about the Net and copyright law.
I believe the Slashdot post should be amended to avoid this error as it confuses the entire issue. If, of course, there is some reason why the word "recipe" was used instead of "article", Slashdot should be the first to point out the errors in the other publications.
Slashdot Mirror
The post stated:
3- And, best of all: absolutely nothing seems to be able to diminish the confidence that experts feel. The last one is truly remarkable: even if experts try to honestly face evidence of their own past failures, even if they deeply understand this flaw in human cognition they will still feel a deep sense of confidence in the accuracy of their predictions.
A better way to put this is people who do not feel such overconfidence will not be recognized as "experts" by anyone. This is a social problem, not a personal one. Human beings more readily believe confidence than veracity. This why there are so many confident idiots around.
This should be obvious to anyone who has dealt substantially with other people at any time in his or her life. Confidence makes one an expert -- more than documents or proof or the ability to obtain, compile, and present convincing evidence.
The post read:
So here's the question, Slashdotters: Is Windows really doomed? And, if not, what can be done to turn things around?
But it should read:
So here's the question, Slashdotters: Is Windows really doomed? And, if not, what can be done to make sure ?
It seems to me that this is the same sort of "justice" the Department of Injustice was meting out. It seems as if the old proverb "what goes around comes around" is particularly applicable in this case. What is unjust about the abusers being abused?
All the personnel at JSTOR deserve to lose their jobs. They are the real pirates: They take a public resource, steal it from the public, and sell it back to the public. This is like someone stealing your car and charging to give it back to you. Or better yet, your neighbor charging you to walk the sidewalk in front of his and your house.
You would not tolerate this behavior from your neighbor. Why do you tolerate it from a website?
Should the employees and investors of JSTOR continue to get paid for theft?
The reason the prosecution has been called "overzealous" is because when the DOJ found they had no evidence of criminal behavior, the rolled out the overly broad CFAA, under which most people's Google searches might be able to be prosecuted, to get him. It is a classic case of the "everyone is guilty" attitude of the police in the English cultural sphere. "If I can't prosecute you for this crime, I will use some other irrelevant thing to make sure you pay." We might as well have cops go gun him down like they do in the movies if we allow this.
This is just more evidence that the US is continuously returning to its feudal English roots where justice means the royal family is right and everyone else can go to hell.
It is good to keep in mind that:
JSTOR didn't do it. They asked DoJ to stop.
That is the lie JSTOR wants everyone to believe. While they claimed to be dropping the case, they were pushing MIT to prosecute -- repeatedly. They must have learned from Adobe's treatment of Sklyarov. Like all corporations, they want to keep their reprehensible activities out of the spotlight. This is why they are pushing for anonymity. They can hide and claim it really was not their fault. In fact, they are the principal puppet master for this whole show. And in the end, they will be seen as having no guilt. This is both the worst possible and most probable outcome.
Even if he had disseminated the documents, it still would not have been wrong. Disseminating Public Domain documents is everyone's right no matter how they were obtained.
You have made some interesting arguments, but they are mostly wrong. Let's take them one by one...
In any case, it doesn't help anything when Anonymous and Lulzsec make threats.
Yes, it does. This response and the principal actors wanting to keep their identities secret is a testament to how much influence these threats have. These criminals with badges are scared. I am glad that there is at least fear to keep their abuse of power in check.
Personally I liked the Guy Fawkes image that V put out, but Anonymous doesn't fit it at all, in fact they ruin it if anything.
On the contrary, they are improving it. Guy Fawkes was nothing but a Catholic and a failure. He was caught in the attempt and hanged as a criminal. In addition, he had a cause that few today would identify as a righteous one. Anonymous, by contrast, has fought against government corruption, the Zetas, and even rapists. They are much more upstanding than Guy Fawkes ever imagined being.
Would V espouse silencing his opposition? That's what anonymous does when they DDoS.
IIRC, V was entirely intent upon revenge: "V for Vendetta". He silenced everybody that had any possibility of opposing his plan, but not with a DDoS. His opponents' silence was a bit more permanent.
It seemed to me that V wanted to bring justice and empower the oppressed, if not he would have killed or at least silenced those detectives who were actively working against him, yet he didn't do either.
The detectives were a tool he used. Viewing himself as evil, he wanted to remove himself from the new world he had created, so he used the detective as a tool to kill himself. The detective was no more in control of himself than Brad Pitt's character was in Seven. While V's revenge had the element of justice, it really was an act of revenge concocted by a brilliant, semi-sane, suicidal freak. Anonymous, on the other hand, has mostly been motivated by injustice or entertainment. Either one is less damnable than revenge or suicidal insanity.
Therefore, I must reject your arguments until you base them upon a more solid foundation.
The real bad actor in this saga is JSTOR;
This needs to be repeated until JSTOR is removed from existence.
An article I read said that MIT reacted to JSTOR complaints. It seems from what I have read that JSTOR wanted MIT to be the bad cop while they repeatedly made public statements about how they were willing to let him off. It appears that their PR people may have learned from the Adobe - Sklyarov incident.
In that case, Adobe initiated the case and actively pushed it until the public outcry hit. Then they quickly backed off and claimed they asked for his release. It is impossible to say what really goes on behind closed doors, but the fact that the DOJ refused to drop the case is telling. I have always believed that they backpedaled publicly but kept pushing for prosecution behind closed doors. That way, everything would be perfect: They would get to punish Sklyarov and also hoodwink the public into thinking they were good or at least not so bad.
JSTOR was probably afraid of weathering the ire of the internet but still wanted him punished as an example. Pushing MIT to be the bad cop would accomplish this goal perfectly. MIT could take the heat, and JSTOR would get its crucifiction. Perfect.
Why does the discussion always center around suicide and Aaron's courage or lack of it? It is now obvious that the Department of Injustice was actually out to get him. It is also now clear that they targeted him for his views and not his actions. Given these facts, how can we -- netizens, citizens of the USA, citizens of the world, humans... take your pick -- allow entities like JSTOR and PACER to continue to exist? And why are we not looking for the people who orchestrated this fiasco (as opposed to the lowly public servants who coldly executed their wishes in obvious contravention of their oaths of office and their duties to the Constitution and people of the US and the world)?
Where are the executives of JSTOR who clandestinely pulled strings to bring on this relentless and unmerited legal assault? Why was the mysterious JSTOR "contact" who complained repeatedly to MIT officials and asked them to take action not identified? Directly or indirectly, JSTOR is responsible for this tragic death. When are they going to apologize or try to make things right? When is the information Aaron sought going to be available to us all? When are we going to ban JSTOR and PACER's theft from the public? When are JSTOR and PACER going to return their ill gotten gains to the people whose documents they stole?
For those who will make the argument: Copying is not theft. Keeping people from accessing things they rightfully own or should have access to is. A car is stolen when the owner cannot use it anymore, not when the same model is produced again by the factory. The owners of these documents are all the members of the public. Denying access to anyone for any reason is theft.
From when I first heard this news, I could not help thinking of the Dmitry Sklyarov case. In both cases, a corporation complained: Adobe and JSTOR. In both cases, when the the corporation found this action was not popular, they "officially" backed off: Adobe dropped the charges due to an internet outcry. JSTOR was "unwilling" to press charges. Finally, in both cases, the prosecutor was adamant that the trial continue.
I think the puppet show should be fairly obvious to anyone looking at the facts. JSTOR was obviously complaining a lot to MIT and pushing MIT to prosecute. JSTOR just did not want anyone to know publicly that they were doing that. Will MIT publish all of its communications with JSTOR related to this incident? While TFA names the individual at MIT that was receiving the complaints, it does not mention who at JSTOR was complaining. I find the secrecy around this a little telling.
In an assassination, who is the real murderer: the person who orders the assassination or the person who pulls the trigger? In my opinion, they are all guilty. JSTOR is playing innocent, and they should not be allowed to do so. Further, Aaron had a point, JSTOR's existence is an assault on the First Amendment and the very concepts of democracy and science.
I think that JSTOR should be dissolved as a result of this incident, and all documents under its control should lose their copyrights; publishers be damned.
Growing up in the United States, I have been served the koolaid of Capitalism several times and I have been taught that the inherent competition and struggle for money in all aspects of our lives make us the greatest country ever. I've read a lot of your comments on intellectual property reform and I can't help but feel that it just isn't compatible with capitalism. Have you ever had problems rectifying your stance on intellectual property with capitalism?
I always find it very interesting every time I see this argument. What is it about the US education system that gives the impression that monopolies such as copyright and patent are inherent and necessary elements of "capitalism"? Is it just a "This is our system now, and our system now is capitalism" kind of thing?
Monopolies are the opposite of Laissez-faire capitalism or free trade. They restrict who can participate in money making enterprises. They are inherently prejudicial and usually prejudicial to wealthy parties. Further, government backed monopolies, as opposed to spontaneous wealth based monopolies, are an unfair abuse of government power to restrict the free market. Monopolies have a long history in Europe's feudal period, and copyright itself was born out of a long tradition of monarchical censorship in England in which the publishers were charged with monopolizing information to control the public.
The term "intellectual property" leads to even scarier territory. The term itself smacks of 1984's Thought Police. I am certain that is not your picture of "capitalism". The very concept that ideas can be "property" is offensive. While you are at it, why not package all the air in the world and charge people to breathe?
As such, whose view of capitalism is really flawed and in need of rectification: yours? or Mr. Stallman's? The way I see it, the onus is on you, eldavojohn, to justify your incorrect view of what capitalism is, your support of feudalism, and your support of censorship. Do you believe in capitalism, the free market, and liberal democracy? Or do you believe in communism, restricted trade, and monarchies?
What does WinPhone8 need? It needs graduates from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft And Wizardry . Or Lord Voldemort himself -- like Ballmer with real power and a human IQ.
If only this guy were right!
Imagine going to 10 or 20 years with no babies. This would be the best thing that could ever happen to the world, and it would delay the inevitable resource failure that always occurs with massive population growth. There will soon be 7 Billion people on the planet (yes, that is with a BIG B). A generation without babies would relieve economic and resource pressure greatly without the intervention of disease or starvation or war. We can only hope that this author is right -- even though biology and nature observably prove him wrong.
The Slashdot crowd is a good audience for the math of this whole thing. Fact: A single bacterium with unlimited space to grow and an unlimited food supply can reproduce enough to equal the weight of the Earth in just 72 hours (cell division every 30 seconds). Try it yourself. Post the code in this thread. I will if I get time this afternoon.
Anyone who has done big "O" notation knows that exponential growth is second only to factorial growth and that the rate quickly exceeds whatever resources are allocated. However, no one applies these numbers to the world we live in. Sooner or later, the resources must be exhausted. So, a generation that does not have kids would be a welcome break from our bounding dash for the abyss.
Someone will inevitably argue about the problems this could cause. Yeah, old people might have to work, but the real effect will be that employers will have to hire experienced people instead of ignorant college kids. Employers and teachers have the most to lose. Employers because they exploit young people for cheap labor, and teachers because their jobs depend on children. But all of these considerations are miniscule when compared to global starvation or war or both.
It gets even more absurd when you consider that this whole discussion really is not about "lending e-books" but rather lending e-book readers . These publishers are placing these limits even though the libraries have a limited number of devices they are handing out (far fewer than the books they carry).
From what I read, none of the articles mentioned just having the library load the file onto your preferred device. So, obviously, they are speaking in general terms to confound the issue again.
There is friction: Libraries can only afford to have so many e-book readers on loan at any given time. In addition to that, they have to pay for all the books they loan on those few devices -- no matter how many times they lend them. Plus, for the publishers, they have to purchase books at least twice (one physical and one electronic). So, libraries are spending more, and the publishers are using this to once again bamboozle the public into seeing them as the victim.
Good point. I think RMS' concept is not out of touch with the times so much as out of touch with convenience. He has shown time and time again that he is willing to sacrifice convenience for freedom. In my opinion, the world needs more such people.
After all, Stalin really didn't institute any effective data system that kept track of the minute details of his citizens' lives. This was mostly because he didn't have the technology, but that's just a detail. His major Evil Achievement was arranging to slaughter tens of millions of his own citizens, mostly people who weren't even his political enemies. This didn't require massive monitoring or huge databases; it merely required sending out the troops.
From what a friend claimed, it did involve massive lists, though. Evidently, Stalin approved the executions of hundreds of people a night by name. I had known that he stayed up all night during his schooling to read numerous books per night, but I had not known that he was such a micro-manager. In any case, mass executions are generally supported by accounting systems: the better the accounting system, the more victims. Stalin was hardly the only one to use an efficient accounting system to kill millions in the last century. The existence of this information is threatening because we cannot know what will be in the imaginations of the Stalins of the future.
The point is that this is a new phenomenon, with implications most people haven't considered.
As I imagine that is the purpose of Slashdot and as I started reading this discussion with that in mind, what would be a good solution to this problem?
Does everyone have to become a phreaker to protect their privacy? Would new laws help? How could an individual "stick it to the man" (especially if that "man" were a hundred billion dollar behemoth like AT&T)? Could a social practice, such as hundreds of people buying unlimited plans and swapping phones permanently or frequently, mitigate the effects of this? Or is the human race just doomed?
I have been wondering this since I read RMS does not carry a cellphone. Do we need another creative visionary to come up with a completely unanticipated solution to this problem?
Should we be surprised?
Our Grocery stores track what we purchase, and everyone said "oh well, cheaper prices" (BS But okay).
Our ISPs track our information, even hijack DNS error pages now. Everyone said "Oh well, they are a business"
Now this, and I guarantee it will be "Oh well, they are a business that needs to make money"
I think there is a difference between the tracking the grocery store is doing and the tracking a phone company is doing. At a grocery store, it is completely voluntary. Customers do not have to have tracking numbers (I, for one, have never had one). If they do choose to have their purchases tracked, they are "paid" for it in discounts. And that tracking is limited to what the customers purchased and perhaps the store they purchased it in.
Cellphones, on the other hand, are tracking your physical location at any given time. No announcement is given, and customers get no discounts or other rewards for using cellphones. In fact, cellphone companies, while creating and probably selling this valuable data, are constantly looking for ways to charge their customers more money for service. In addition to all this, in the US, all or nearly all of the major cellphone carriers were complicit in sharing this information with the federal government unlawfully and pushing for unconstitutional laws to back out of it.
Online tracking is often not connected to one's real identity. In fact, this is why so many people are alarmed when they talk about being able to identify people by their habits. It is getting more and more difficult to remain anonymous, and that is obviously a threat to privacy. Cellphones are always tied to identity, even more than Internet access. A cellphone is with you wherever you go and whatever you do. Connections to the Internet can be made and severed, and there is no way to be certain that a given individual is behind a given computer. With cellphones, again, this is not the case. People occasionally loan their cellphones to other people, but not with near the frequency with which people borrow others' computers (Corporations are trying to change this with dumb Internet devices like the Ipad).
So much more private and individually traceable information is available to cellphone carriers that it could almost be separated into its own league of privacy discussions. As more and more people access the Internet through their cellphones, the shift away from privacy will be even more dramatic and frightening than it was over the last decade. If anyone is considering a privacy Bill of Rights, it should start with the cellphone carriers. They are probably the biggest single enemy of privacy the public has ever faced.
How is using software from MS any less risky? It isn't like MS products haven't contained illegally copied code in the past.
Worse yet. They may choose to discontinue the product and all support for it or break it with an update -- as they have done repeatedly in the past. If Google discontinues Android, any or all of the companies currently distributing it can continue as before. Google cannot pull the plug on Android. WinPhone7 can be destroyed whenever MS chooses.
And all that is assuming that it will be usable enough for anyone to care. If older versions of Windows Mobile and WinCE are any indication, no one will.
As for illegally copied software in MS products, who could ever know? As they keep their source code secret, you can never know if they are infringing or not or what it will mean if they get caught. This is why all this anti-FOSS stuff is so absurd. FOSS is clean, and anybody can check. No MS software can make that claim because their source code is not available to public scrutiny. They are the true communists -- people supporting a system of autocratic secretive control supported by barely believable lies.
You know, there are two licensing-related problems Google is facing now with Android: the Oracle lawsuit, and now this. Both seem to have at least partially arisen because Google didn't float stuff past people who have interests in the technologies they chose to use.
This is unfair to Google. I have plenty of gripes with Android, but these two were not Google's fault. First, nobody considered the header files to be copyrightable material. As one poster above pointed out, people in the FOSS community laughed when SCO made such a claim just a few years ago. If it was not an issue then, how can Google be wrong now? They did not exactly strip out the copyright notices in the kernel source and call it the "Android Kernel®", did they?
In the case of the Java problem, Google could not have anticipated that Sun would be bought by a hostile company that would try to rob them using copyrights. Sun, for all its faults, was pretty reasonable about Java. The new owner, on the other hand, is predatory and crooked. They see an opportunity to hit Google up for some cash, and they are taking it. To blame Google for being a victim of lawyers would be like blaming victims of a natural disaster for living in a place where no natural disasters had struck yet.
Is this Privacy Bill going to protect us from DHS border searches? Since this administration has been so pro-ACTA, I think they should certainly review their opinions on privacy.
I have just wasted the last 24 minutes loading all that Scribd garbage on this slow connection only to find that downloading the document requires a Facebook account. Why is this document not on the Open Internet, I ask? If an Open Internet is what is wanted, why use closed and privacy assaulting services like Facebook? What happened to HTML?
Scribd is only giving me the first 3 pages (of eight). I cannot download the page without identifying myself. Scribd is absolutely full of advertising -- probably three quarters of the time I just wasted loading the site. What is Free or Open about that?
I do not know if this was pointed out elsewhere -- I am certainly not going to read all the comments to find out -- but this post contains a rather large error in relation to copyright. The Slashdot post says:
However, the Gawker article says:
IANAL, but by my understanding of US copyright law according to statements of such people as Jessica Litman, recipes are not subject to copyright as they are merely a set of facts. Copyright does not cover facts. It covers creative works. Cooking may be an art, but the documentation of a set of procedures is not. So, if the "article" is merely a recipe, Cooks Source is completely correct about its own materials -- although they used entirely the wrong language to express this and made incorrect statements about the Net and copyright law.
I believe the Slashdot post should be amended to avoid this error as it confuses the entire issue. If, of course, there is some reason why the word "recipe" was used instead of "article", Slashdot should be the first to point out the errors in the other publications.
Does this mean we can finally have Skype protocol built into Pidgin? I would love to stop using Skype's crapware.